Local architect presents histories of two San Antonio African American communities

By Vincent T. Davis, Staff Writer

June 18, 2016Updated: June 20, 2016 11:02am

For years, retired Air Force Maj. J. Michael Wright wondered why all the property in his Northeast Side subdivision had been developed except for a single acre-size lot, fenced in and packed with trees and thorny brush.

As he walked his two children to Northern Hills Elementary School, day after day, they watched the chaparral on the neglected plot next to the school grow to twice its size. He joked with his kids that maybe it was a secret nuclear site. There were rumors it was a graveyard.

Eventually, curiosity overcame him and he began researching. He found a map at the Bexar County tax assessor-collector’s office that positively identified the lot as a cemetery. But whose was it? Why had it been abandoned? Were there still human remains there?

Carlson researched deeds and records for the area, including the late 1800s U.S. census, and found tantalizing clues that the cemetery might once have been part of a long-lost African-American settlement connected to the community of Wetmore, northeast of what’s now International Airport.

It was the start of a surprising journey that would uncover other African-American enclaves in the area long lost to history, and the families that established them: Hockley, Winters and Griffin.

The beginning

As Wright and Carlson continued their hunt in the early days, online and in person, they talked to former gravediggers, funeral home directors, genealogical societies and state experts. And they found out about landscape architect Everett L. Fly, a San Antonio native nationally recognized for preserving historic sites across the nation.

Wright e-mailed Fly a summary of the records he and Carlson had accumulated for more than a year.

“It was like an aha moment,” Fly said. “There's more to this, just like I thought. I could tell there was some real substance to it and it was authentic information.

“The locations verify there were black quadrants of the city, in that area. I knew right away there should be something that could be done and addressed in a more formal way.”

It was painstaking work, because there’s a dearth of official information. Fly said some records kept on African-Americans from that time period list only a first name and no information on where the person was born. Some people took new names, which makes it difficult to trace family connections. And, in many cases, no records at all were kept about African-Americans.

Photo: Vincent T. Davis

Descendants of the Winters family have a copy of the emancipation letter where E.C. Alsbury freed their ancestor Robert “Bob” Winters from slavery. The short letter is written in longhand and has “San Antonio, Texas,” and “July 1st, 1866,” at the top. In the letter, Alsbury credits Winters for “faithful service” and gives him possession of two horses. Alsbury also helped Winters buy land.

Descendants of the Winters family have a copy of the emancipation...

They turned to oral histories and family stories. There, the researchers were fortunate. They discovered numerous modern-day descendants of the three families who had kept cherished documents passed down from generation to generation — some tucked away in Bibles and shoe boxes — dating to 1865 that yielded information not found in libraries or city archives. Tales told from mother to daughter, father to son also are helping to piece together this little-known part of San Antonio history.

Fly found a key common factor in the Wetmore area settlements: they all were started by former slaves, emancipated on June 19, 1865, 21/2 years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Descendants of the Winters family have a copy of the emancipation letter where E.C. Alsbury freed their ancestor Robert “Bob” Winters from slavery.

The short letter is written in longhand and has “San Antonio, Texas,” and “July 1st, 1866,” at the top.

In the letter, Alsbury credits Winters for “faithful service” and gives him possession of two horses. Alsbury also helped Winters buy land, Fly said.

A treasure trove of information came from a handmade book and a 9-foot-long family tree produced by descendant Edward Winters, who spent years poring over deeds, treaties, archives and other records and talking with now-deceased family members. The book helped Fly make more connections between the Winters and Griffin families.

Fly returned the favor, giving the family members data he had uncovered that they didn’t know.

For example, Robert Winters had one of the five black cattle brands registered with Bexar County. Some were marked “COL” for colored. Fly also told the family that the emancipated Winters had dedicated land for a school, a church and the cemetery, forming the traditional nucleus of the community.

The information was new, but didn’t surprise some family members.

“We were civic, we were community and we were spiritual,” Kevin Winters said. “And we’re still community minded today.”

Melanie Winters Brooks called the discoveries surreal.

“When I was a young girl, I didn’t appreciate the family unit for what I understand now,” Brooks said. “The civic duties and how they helped established the black presence in this community for the time that they did and the progressiveness of this family is overwhelming.”

Fly met with Brooks, Kevin Winters and a dozen other Winters descendants at Brooks’ home on the South Side last month.

They gathered around Daniel Winters, 83, the patriarch of the family. He was born in a house not far from Thousand Oaks and Wetmore Road. He remembers walking with his parents to clean the Winters family cemetery, which was located near where the Jim’s Restaurant now is, at Nacogdoches Road and Loop 1604.

That cemetery no longer exists; the remains of the 71 people buried there were relocated in 1986 to the Holy Cross Cemetery.

Hockley Cemetery

Before Wright and Carlson met Fly, they made several visits to the overgrown lot they now know as the Hockley Cemetery.

The retired major and the archivist slogged through calf-high grass on an easement to climb over the chain link fence into the thorny chaparral, where they scoured for anything that might shed light on the area’s history.

Crawling under a tree, Carlson found a chunk of stone with worn letters spelling “Green” carved into the surface that could have been a headstone. About the only other things they found were dozens of old baseballs, perhaps left there by kids who hadn’t dared venture into the darkness of the thick undergrowth.

As they continued to search through documents, Carlson found a drawing that showed 1.262 acres marked as a rectangle-shaped cemetery, abutted and bookended by houses, cul-de-sacs and crosswalks near Uhr Lane and Higgins Road. Maps prepared by LostTexasRoads.com show survey lines of the graveyard from a 1908 Bexar County deed record matching the Bexar County Appraisal District Record of the property as “Lot P-99 (CEMETERY).”

Bexar County archives showed the property once was owned by Jane Warren, who was born in 1830 in Alabama. By 1847, she was living in Hays County. In 1908, she set aside land for burials from 107 acres she had bought in 1873, signing her name as “X.” It was that land that became the Hockley Cemetery.

Though not much is known about this pioneer woman, she must have been a maverick of her era, because she had her own cattle brand YOK and bought her own property despite being black and a woman. She was married to Wilson Hockley, but never took his name.

Becoming a land owner during that era for any woman would have been difficult, said Carey Latimore, associate professor and chairman, department of history at Trinity University.

“She’s very legally astute,” he said. “It’s something you don’t often see. She’s business savvy and knowledgeable enough to ensure that there’s something for her children.”

In her will, Warren bequeathed her property, including the cemetery, to her four sons in equal measures: Henry Jackson, Aaron Freeman, Alonzo Hockley and Monroe Hockley. A great-great granddaughter of Warren still lives on the Southwest Side.

Through the following decades, ownership of the land changed hands several times, Carlson found. Esther Hockley Clay, who died in 1982 at age 101, was the last recorded owner of the cemetery.

Turns out the Hockley descendants hadn’t staked a claim on the land because they thought they would be charged back taxes they couldn’t afford; they weren’t aware that cemeteries are exempt from property taxes by state law.

Family members say the last burials took place in 1973. Family lore has it that when the modern-day subdivision was going up in the early 1980s, the driver of a bulldozer clearing the land uncovered human bones and walked off the job, refusing to continue. The story goes that no worker would go back, so the developers simply built around the 1.2 acres.

No one knows exactly how many people are buried there.

Griffin Cemetery

In contrast to the Hockley and Winters cemeteries, the Griffin Family Cemetery has been maintained as a place of reverence in the Oak Ridge Village subdivision, near Thousand Oaks and Tavern Oaks, since the subdivision went up in 1990s. Twelve members of the Griffin and Winters families are buried at the grave site.

Recently, relatives from the two clans met Home Owners Association president Connie Smith at the gated cemetery that sits near the entrance to the neighborhood.

Smith said the community has embraced the opportunity to honor the former slaves who founded a freeman settlement on the land where Oak Ridge Village now lies.

When Smith moved into the neighborhood 18 years ago, she was intrigued by the neatly kept cemetery with a granite sign that notes the first burial was in 1900.

She did some research and found that the state had issued a resolution for the cemetery. Despite not knowing anything about the people buried there, she and neighbors would gather on the weekends to clean the cemetery.

“It was the right thing to do,” Smith said. One time, several headstones were vandalized and a person in the neighborhood anonymously paid to get them fixed.

She often wondered about the families of those laid to rest at the Griffin Family Cemetery.

And then, in a stroke of serendipity, Smith spotted Fly as he was making his first visit to the cemetery in March. Smith just happened to be walking by with a friend.

“It was a God moment,” Smith said.

They started talking and he told her the story.

On the day the families met last week, Remethia Winters Little knelt and brushed a bit of debris from the face of a stone marker. Nearby, Cynthia Young Miller recalled how, as a child, she’d walk with her family down a road, now Tavern Oaks Street, during funerals to the sprawling oak tree in the cemetery that served as a landmark.

The tree towered over the spot where her great-grandfather Horace Griffin’s home once stood.

“It’s a real discovery,” Smith marveled, as she heard the family stories. “It makes it so much more special that the man was a slave. This is a jewel in our neighborhood.”

What’s next

Hindes, the city archaeologist, said Fly’s efforts highlight a poorly understood part of San Antonio's past that hasn’t been completely explored.

“There is so much history, but (still) so much history to rediscover,” Hindes said. “And it takes someone who is passionate like Everette to flush it out. There are valuable stories left to be told and should be told.”

For his part, Fly points out that it was Wright’s passion and persistence that put the spotlight on the Hockley cemetery and led to more details about the other local black communities. It’s a major find in San Antonio history, he said.

“I give Mike a lot of credit,” Fly said. “This makes it clear that black folks were involved with all kinds of people. They just weren’t isolated by themselves. The buying of the land is a major start of civil rights. When you read different versions of the Texas Constitution, it says if a person owned real property they were entitled to vote. It was great, if they owned land they were able to vote.”

While the research continues, attention is turning to protecting the site.

“We don’t want the graves moved, just left alone because of its history,” said Joyce Harvey, spokeswoman for the Hockley family.

That’s just what the discoverers are hoping to do.

“What we’re trying to do is preserve that (land) by letting people know it’s there,” Wright said. “To me, it’s intriguing how everything is interrelated.”

Fly said the first step toward preserving Hockley Cemetery is to get a proper and systematic cleaning process started. The ground will have to be cleared by hand, inch by inch, and each fragment of headstone found must be marked.

The team is also working with the descendants of the Warren family to establish rights to their ancestors’ burial ground.

Clifford Griffin said he and his family appreciate the work that’s been done to bring the lost communities to light.

“As they died off, the history started disappearing, and the next thing you know, you don’t have nothing,” Griffin said. “Now that we’re getting all of this information back to us, it’s great stuff to know we were a big part of San Antonio in the 1800s.”